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What’s HR Doing About the Employee Engagement Crisis?

Day in the Life Series: 12 p.m. to 1 p.m.

By Dennis Jones

employee-engagement-crisis

That was a whirl wind meeting if ever there was one, thought Krempe’s Head of People and Recruiting, after ushering out the HR consultants from Krempe headquarters. The hour-long virtual call that had started at 9 a.m. had ended for everyone else at 10 a.m. The Head of P&R though had essentially been trapped by the consultants and one of the senior software engineers, who had opened up about her own mini employee engagement crisis in Software Engineering.

The conversation had lasted about two hours – three meetings she’d had to cancel, luckily she had the virtual meeting app on her phone. Sheesh, if things weren’t bad enough in P&R.

And they were. It seemed like everyone (indeed everyone) had been in an uproar about the employee engagement crisis, putatively discovered by the engagement survey. And the target of everyone’s ire? You guessed it, the beleaguered Head of P&R, who found it difficult enough to do her job well in the best of times.

Now she was in the middle of the storm. The CEO, for one, seemed to take the employee engagement crisis, she bristled to think of it like that, as nothing less than a personal affront to her short tenure as CEO. Her boss, the CFO, was outraged by the cost of the HR consultants. Granted, he was pretty much in a perpetual outrage, especially when she introduced a new scheme to improve employee satisfaction at Krempe. “Another waste of money.”

The HR consultants had also bent her about all of the perceived sources of the so-called crisis of employee engagement. Surprise, surprise, the source of the crisis, in their minds, seemed to be her (lack of) leadership. It was starting to sound like a theme.

And the coup de grâce? The brewing mutiny in Software Engineering that would require further investigation, and of course, more resources. Compound it all, she was seriously under slept, having woken up early, so that she enough time to negotiate Krempe’s byzantine connectivity services to launch the video conference promptly at 9 a.m.

Could life get any worse?

See what happened next.